Wednesday, July 23, 2008

While on-hold waiting for a customer service rep to "help" us, we thought we make use of this time to give you the offical Urban Etiquette...

Top Five Customer Service Gripes

1. Know what the hell you're talking about.Unless you're new, learn your damned products and services before telling us what we can or cannot do / change / accomplish. If we've been a customer for 12 years and you've been a service rep for 12 minutes, we might just know a bit more than you.

2. Familiarize yourself with the term "Empathy."And, for chrissakes, implement it! Sometimes just hearing out a complaint is half the battle. But if you brush our very real problem aside, you're creating a hostile correspondence.

Think of it this way: if it was serious enough for us to call in and spend the time to navigate the plethora of "automated system" roadblocks on your "service" line, then it's serious enough for you to express at least feigned care and understanding.

3. Don't take it out on us.That ungrateful asshole you just spend 26 minutes arguing with? Yeah - don't know him. I'm me and this is the reason for my call.

So make with the answers already and save the attitude for those stepchildren that you'll probably be yelling at in the supermarket later tonight (hmm...another good topic).

4. Don't make us repeat our account number yet again.Is it just us or do we find ourselves constantly keying-in account numbers and other personal information all the way through the automated system process...

...just to have to do it all over again when we finally get a live person on the line? What the hell's the point? Are all customer service calls routed through 1-800-4-SADISM first?

5. Language barriers are unacceptable.To all of those decision-makers who outsource your customer service call centers to other countries: Fuck You.

You are the reason blood pressure rises and pulses quicken every time we realize that we need to waste a day of our lives trying to decipher just what the hell is being said over the phone from the other side of the world.

This is, in no way, meant to be racist. It is simply stupid. And counter-intuitive.

Putting someone who does not speak clear, understandable English on the phone to handle a problem too complicated for us to figure out on our own tells us that you don't care enough about your customers to address their needs in a reasonable manner.

Not to mention that it's thoroughly un-American! (fist-bumps Steven Colbert)